Traditionally, the conventional approach to protecting structures from disruptive forces, for example strong winds, seismic vibrations, or explosions, has been to strengthen structures themselves—either by fortifying a structure's walls and foundations, or simply by utilizing stronger, perhaps heavier materials. In the last few decades, those skilled in the art have understood that such methods are not appropriate for medium to tall structures due to the frequencies that are generated through, for example, buildings or bridges, which ultimately cause the structures to collapse. These old methods of strengthening structures are thus not as effective for any structure as newly developed methods.
Relatively recent, base isolation devices have been developed to isolate or decouple structures from disruptive forces, such as seismic forces produced during an earthquake, or strong winds, in particular against tall structures such as buildings. However, these systems have proven expensive and inadequate for smaller structures such as family homes.
In addition to the higher costs that make base isolation and similar devices inadequate for smaller, family homes (i.e. most contractors wont implement such devices in family homes to keep budgets low), current designs are difficult to predict mathematically, which poses a major problem for engineers that design structures that necessitate base isolation technology.
There is a need in the art for an energy absorbing system that may be implemented in a variety of applications, that is cost-effective, that can be constructed from known materials, is more reliable and less expensive to construct than devices presently known in the art, and a design that facilitates finite prediction modeling. It is to these ends that the present invention has been developed.